Cheryl Pyle, Max Ridgeway, Randall Colbourne, Green Underworld

Green Underworld (11th Street Music CD 2013) is a moody jazz-contemporary offering by the distinctive trio formed by Cheryl Pyle, flute and poetry, Max Ridgeway, guitar and acoustic bass, and Randall Colbourne, drums.

It has free elements, poetic depth and improvisational expressiveness. There is a new music influence that can be heard especially in some of the ravishing flute lines and guitar explorations. It's a music of mood, a quietly spacey journey through some murky green depths, a kind of drifting toward a peace of understanding, a pieced-together landscape of seaweed and seafoam.

All three collectively produce a music of originality, with Ms. Pyle's flute and quiet poetry evoking the modern art of Miro and Klee, gentle abstraction, angular lines. The three together produce a modern avant melange that goes about its way with an avant mellow-dee scape that relaxes yet is three-square in a free innovative zone, a sort of improvised jazz version of Morton Feldman's quietude. Flute, guitar and free, quiet, inner-directed percussion meld with Cheryl's recurring poetic action-imagery to set out a special place for our ears and inner imagination.

It's very easy to hear and puts one in a zone that feels good. If you come for the flute, which you should, you'll leave with a feeling of group stasis, of steady-state wonder at the mysteriousness of existence, of the floating oceanic vastness we live surrounded by.

Nice!